Angels in Australia

Melbourne writer-poet Peter Davis has been
living with HIV for 18 years. Now married with a
child, he has stared death in the face and
fought it with courage and creativity.

I caught the HIV virus in 1986
when I was 19. It was the year
after my deferral from forestry
science at Melbourne University, a
move sparked by my desire to
travel and to learn about life. But
I knew little about HIV/ AIDS.

After six months, I got a job
pouring drinks at the Prince of Wales
Hotel in St Kilda, which had live bands
and also a gay disco on Sundays.
Initially, I just enjoyed the bands,
although I soon had my first night with
a sexually experienced man.

Where I grew up in the western
suburbs people were fairly nonaccepting
of homosexuality, especially
my father. To overcome my guilt that
night, I drank a lot. When the man
offered to use a condom, I refused. It
was like I needed to abandon my sense
of responsibility, so I wouldn't have to
feel the guilt.

I wonder now, why don't people
discuss safe sex calmly, at an earlier
stage, when on a date? Making decisions
in the heat of the moment is very
different to the cold light of day. There
is a sense of further permissiveness
during sex, when the level of arousal
gets high.

In the spring of 1986, I started night
classes in preparation for my return to
uni, and met a girl. We found a flat
together in summer. That Christmas,
my mother suddenly re-contacted me
after two years of separation, and she
paid for a short holiday in the country
together.

The night we arrived, I became
dizzy, feverish and delirious. It
happened that quickly. The wind had
maintained its sense of humour. I woke
from a dream washed up on a salty bed.
My flesh was at high tide: rock pools
formed on my chest and little fears
shone in the moonlight.

My mother is a nurse and she intuitively
realised it was serious. A few
days later I was in the AIDS ward at
Fairfield Hospital, without the strength
to move from bed. My fevers lasted a
week.

There are two indelible memories of
this period: the sound of lyrebirds
outside the window at night, and lying
to my doctor about never having had
sex with a man. The lie made no difference,
of course, to my blood tests.

I had to wait six weeks for my HIV
result. There were two visits to an
outpatient clinic, where each time my
result had not arrived, although I'd been
told it would. I rang the third time 
just to make sure. The doctor seemed to
already know the results and I was very
pushy.

Peter DavisPicture: Supplied

He said, "Well, I guess if I
demand you come in again, you're
probably going to know what it is
anyway". After the phone-call, I went
and told my girlfriend, who was then
sleeping.

I thought I knew back then what
HIV/AIDS meant. It was 1987 and the
chilling Grim Reaper television
commercials  more like a short horror
movie  had been broadcast. They
taught me that HIV meant AIDS, and
that AIDS meant death.

At 20 and in a melodramatic frame
of mind, I sold most of my things and
also gave away my vinyl record collection
 the only event I still regret! We
gathered money to travel around
Australia for what I thought might be
one last time. My girlfriend then tested
HIV negative.

There was no counselling after my
diagnosis, as it was early in the
epidemic and things werent very
organised. When I asked my poor
doctor the obvious, cliched question, he
replied that I might have five years to
live, maybe many more  they just
didn't know enough about the disease
yet.

Sitting there in his surgery room, I
felt like an actor on stage without a part
 only saying what I thought I ought
to. The doctor suggested that I report
for blood tests every three to six months
in a capital city.

When I told my best friend, he
hugged me and cried. He suggested
that I keep a journal and record my
thoughts while travelling. Then, in a
small camping park on the east coast, I
wrote my first, obscure poems that
became a crucial outlet for finding calm
and releasing pent-up emotion.

My girlfriend and I went
through the cycles of
grief, self-pity, self-abuse
and fear . . . and then we
separated a year after
my diagnosis.

This was the hardest
stage of my living with HIV. I travelled
again around Australia and lived mostly
by picking fruit.

Then my mother gave me a book
that had been mentioned by a man
with AIDS, who had appeared on the
Channel Ten news. It talked of healing
yourself with immune therapy, meditation,
massive doses of vitamin C and
Chinese herbs; it was the first bit of
hope. There weren't yet any effective
pharmaceutical treatments.

In 1989, I met John Marriot  the
brave man, who appeared on the news
 at a private Melbourne clinic
offering injections of mistletoe and
vitamin C. John was a fun, wealthy interior
designer, who spent six months in
San Francisco and six months in
Melbourne. He organised a peer
support group of HIV-positive people at
a member's St Kilda flat. All the other
members of the group were middle
aged, gay guys in their 40s.

John had the latest information from
the US about HIV and complementary
therapies. I usually sat still and listened
very quietly, perhaps scared of the
lesions on their faces. John believed in
sharing our creativity as a method for
healing, and conducted guided visualisations
garnering self-belief.

By the
early 1990s, everyone else in that group
died in a soft-shell peace. Most had
lived longer than their doctors
expected. Multiple grief is especially
harder to define because our loss is not
connected to one individual. There
seemed too many funerals to find tears
anymore.

I wrote a play about my experiences
in that peer support group.
There were strong themes to write as
time represented the collapse of
immunity in our bodies; the closer we
come to death, the more honest our
words.

HIV-positive characters are inconsistent,
contradictory as they live and die
in social conditions often without
harmony. The way people cope with
their own disease progression is not
arbitrary to the reactions of people who
surround them.

My favourite play inspired by HIV
and AIDS is Tony Kushner's Angels in
America, because it combines a political
message, a broad social context and
also fantasy  important paradigms
about living with HIV/AIDS.

Fantasy is a refreshing part of the
HIV experience. Many utilise it as a
way of both escaping from and also
managing their fears. We imagine a
body image, when our physical self is
changing. We include fantasy in safe sex
practise to increase enjoyment and
encourage safe sex compliance. Early in
the epidemic, many also fantasised
elaborately about their funerals, planning each detail as a way of
approaching their mortality.

Another favourite example of
creativity involving HIV/AIDS is the
AIDS Memorial Quilt Project that
commemorates the lives of the dead.
By the mid-1990s in Melbourne, the
cavernous space of the Exhibition
Buildings was needed to accommodate
the number of panels being displayed.

At that time, I joined an HIV activist
group and also became a board
member of the Victorian AIDS Council.
I learnt a lot during this period. For
example, that the goal was to end the
HIV/AIDS epidemic and not always to
create artwork that would live on and
be considered transcendent.

Education requires that visual art
messages immediately grab attention.
In the case of the Beats Campaign that
was conducted in Australia to educate
men about safe sex at beats, a series of
mock road signs were employed: "Safe
Sex Ahead!" and "Condoms Next Nine
Inches!"

By the late 1990s, burnout was a big
issue for many people, including
myself. The threat of the AIDS epidemic
is so huge that it is hard to slow down
and pace ones personal involvement. I
was involved in too many things:
weekly radio program, regularly
speaking to school groups, committee
work and other representations.

Eventually, I dropped right out. I had married a very supportive
and creative woman, who is HIV
negative, in 1994. We met during
rehearsals for a play in amateur
theatre.

Doctors and a counsellor said it
was OK to have a relationship, as
long as we practised safe sex. This
meant using a condom with water
based lubricant. We decided not to
practise oral sex, although the risk was
considered almost negligible.

In 2002, we had a baby son through
a sperm donor program at the Royal
Women's Hospital in Melbourne.
In 2003, I became sick for the first
time since my initial diagnosis. My T4
white blood cells had again dropped
dramatically. My test results also indicated
that my body was carrying
extremely high numbers of virus.
Mostly, I just felt tired and had lots of
colds.

I started pharmaceutical treatments
for HIV/AIDS in March. My initial
results have been very good. My level of
virus numbers dropped within the first
month to almost nothing. My T4 cells
are slowly rising again.

It is probably fortunate that I caught
a strain of the HIV virus so early in the
epidemic, which had not been previously
exposed to the HIV pharmaceutical
treatments and been able to build
up a viral resistance.

In Australia, there has been a recent
rise in new HIV infections but the
number is small compared with Asia or
Africa. And, almost 20 years since
contracting it, I'm still feeling positive.

Dying in a forest

my desire to share the love my parents gave
has lead me to my homeland
first there was a plane, then a bus and now
a trail through a forest that leads back to a tiny village
it is a light forest with spindly trees and thickets
of bamboo my heart grew a thousand feelings
the tiger could smell the iron scent of my heartbeat
I could see a beautiful fire deep within its unmoved eyes
and then the tiger came for me; it measured each stride brutally
when it growled I knelt and there felt the constant tremors of the earth
I promised to myself then a beautiful death
and strange visions began like a flood
at first they pitter-pattered upon my young old mind
which began to sag like a roof unequipped for the
heavy rains of wisdom
I had always wanted to be special and that is a part of my suffering
finally the grey horses of my imagination had carried me home
had stirred the dust of my childhood dreams with their mighty gallop of trust
then I felt my vision fade into the softness of light
and now we are all the same

By Peter Davus, previously published in West of west, Footscray Community Arts Centre.